Its not good its GREEAAAAATTTTT! Amazing setting to an amazing game, but will work for all OSR rulesets.

Absolutely incredible! Compelling plot hooks for every type of player, regardless of alignment, and content that has been incredibly well thought out.

Love the choices, not overly complex and fits the Shadowdark RPG nicely. Great list of classes and can draw inspiration from even if you wanted to design your own. A steal at the price.

Excellent. This compilation of equipment adds just enough variety and optional bits to not slow down or bloat the base game. Adds fun without adding overhead.

Unnecessary detail that offers little to the game. Creative narrative solutions happen intuitively by the GM and players and not by additional rules you'll find here.

Great material to add additional detail for the Alien RPG, while still being short and to the point.

Long story short: This game is what the OSR is/should all about, it's well worth a look to anyone remotely interested in innovation and game design rooted in TSR D&D mechanics.

The long is me going through every section of the book and talking about it in general terms:

Art, layout, and chosen color schemes are fantastic. It keeps the same tone thoughout the book which is very laudable. I expected this because A&A1E was also like this, If I had one nitpick it would be that the chapter heading is at the top of every page, I might have had the even pages have “chapter x” instead of the chapter heading. This is very small in the grand scheme of things.

Full blown modular design: Races are segmented into two categories, civilized and barbarian, including usual demihumans alongside less usual monster categories like dark elves, hobgoblins, goblins, lizardfolk, and orcs. More interestingly, this edition makes elves and halflings barbarian, while dark elves and hobgoblins are considered ‘Civilized”. There’s an explicit mention that you can restrict PCs to one of the two categories, and a heavy implication that the categories themselves are definitive but races malleable; there’s no reason Elves can’t be Civilized or Gnomes Barbarian. The switch up brings this implication to the forefront, and honestly intrigued me even though I’ve had and enjoyed the original edition for years.

Races themselves are pared down to a minor set of benefits and a page of flavor, very good flavor. This is fantastic because it does a good job to limit pigeonholing a specific race into a specific class. The only race that gets an ability bonus is the Human, and you get to pick the bonus so you aren’t pushed a specific direction.

No monks, bards, druids, and other bizarre nonsensical classes. It’s obvious this class list was chosen with a specific purpose in mind for each. The one that seems the least like an adventurer type is the Enchanter, but after looking at their spell list it’s another very well done stylized form of Magic User with a diverse litany of spells. It’s not often I see a class called Enchanter that I would be totally fine playing.

As an aside, I must say the Savage class is great. I love seeing Barbarian-style classes that aren't just berserking rage-monsters.

Every class is broken down into more than just “the way I murder things”. Each has unique expertise (basically an inherent skill your class makes you an expert in), can uniquely identify something based on what the class should be able to identify, and while spellcasters get spells, non-spellcasters (called mundanes) advance in a limited set of ways. This isn’t the trap that Feats were with 3E, every choice is useful and there are a limited set, not a series of doors to open in the system that are locked with Feats as the keys. Other than the standard benefits of classes there’s also unique followers for each class that are not merely 0-level peons, of the same class, but have their own intrinsic benefits and a shade of domain-level play.

It's here where I found a typo: The Zealot class followers are called "Curates", but the statblock for a standard Curate is labeled "Zealot". As the class didn't exist in the previous edition I'm assuming it was originally named something else and it's followers were named Zealots, and the statblock never got updated when things changed.

Encumbrance is simple and based on pounds, and is informed by Constitution. Movement speed is simple and based on feet, and is informed by Dexterity.

Weapons section is great too. HPs aren’t determined by race or class, this game uses a d6 HD standard for all characters (which is different from 1e but not a bad change). Weapons don’t seem to have changed since 1E. I’m specifically very glad multiple dice aren’t used for weapon damage (2d4 warhammers, etc), opting for the flat rate of one die damage where any weapon can roll a 1 and just not be a very effective hit. Nitpick 2: The only disagreement I have with it is the idea that crossbows have less range or do less damage than bows, but it’s fine as long as one both has longer range and does more damage, it’s never made sense that one gets one perk and the other gets the other, as the power of the weapon grants both damage and range. Historically the benefit of crossbows was the ability to keep a bolt nocked and that any idiot can fire one with decent accuracy, unlike the bow which takes more training, but is generally a more effective ranged weapon in all regards. Otherwise I don’t see any problems with the weapons.

Armor: Ascending Armor class system, which is great. It appears there are no class-armor requirements, but armor can penalize stealth abilities and has strength requirements to wear (later I learned it can interfere with casting and require a roll to complete a spell while in armor). It also takes up weight, which is at a premium for magic users due to material components.

Two pages of Fast Packs for those that don’t like shopping at character generation, which is great and should be a standard for every RPG.

Material Components: For the first time in OSR history, a game gives a shit about material components for spellcasters, basically giving them a bonus to have “quivers” of material components to shot their spell “bows. Simple and flavorful and makes casters have additional resource management should they want an extra bang for their buck.

Trophies is the master stroke of this entire game, It appears every monster has pieces of it that have a useful purpose that isn’t immediately obvious For example you can fashion an axebeak’s beak into… an axe. Assassin Vines have fruit with interesting properties, etc.

Advancement seems to top out at 13th level, follows the 3E advancement scheme (which 3E stole from Fallout, to be frank). There are various ways to gain experience, a usual mix of monster murder and treasure acquisition, and it includes a good takedown of “RP experience” which is well deserved.

Death is treated in a measured way, not immediate death at 0 HP, but a decent chance of immediate death at 0 HP, which is a great tradeoff for grittiness sake.

Ten skills exist in the system, all specifically tied to “important to the game” actions, which is a good mindset to have. No silly basket weaving or half a dozen weird semi-investigation skills.

Six classes/traditions of magic, and it looks like every spell is usable by two of them, so there’s a lot of good spillover. I haven’t looked at every spell but Fireball is much more grounded than it’s D&D counterpart, even if you cast it using the material components to boost it.

The section on campaign building is very practical and aims at what the party will see, rather than the pie-in-the-sky stuff these sections generally aim for.

Monsters: the section on monsters is large, has a quick reference section, monsters are easy to find, and it appears all include artwork.

Enchanting items: There’s a great set of sections on enchanting weapons, armor, even other wonderous items. Essentially it’s framed as PC rules, but the GM could easily design items with it. This might be part of the reason the Enchanter was named the Enchanter.

Lastly treasure tables – six tables including 100 unique entries (each), at differing levels of ability. Some of the magic items are either intentionally or unintentionally funny, and all come with a GP value. Very functional.

Throughout this work I marveled at how much thought and care was put into EVERYTHING in this game. Regardless of my minor issues mentioned here and there, this was a masterwork with clear vision through and through.

As a free game, there is few better. I was able to read through the entire rulebook in a couple of hours, including making a sample character in the process. The system is a simplified version of Ars Magica in feel and flavor (I'm unsure if there is any affiliation, but the inspiration is easily seen if you are familiar with the both games). The artwork is donated, but that does not detract from the professional feel of the layout. In summary, given that the game is free, there is no reason not to give it a read through and full marks for world-building.

If I had to find flaw with the game, it would come from two directions. The first has to do with editing. There are at least a half dozen or so fairly obvious gramatical or copy errors throughout the work, which at under a 100 pages seems like it could have been avoided. It is so blaring as to make the work unreadable, but it can pull you out of the zone. This is most especially true when you are reading about the world in someof the narrative elements of the book. The second is that the game screams for detail. The write-up is designed with brevity and simplicity, but in doing so it leaves a bit too much, in my opinion, to the architect. That isn't the end of the world, but there is too much of a great idea going on here to not fill it out with more detail. This game needs expansions! The short least of player classes it reminiscient of the old Basic Box set for D&D, with demi-humans being used in the same way as a class. Again, I understand the desire for "short and sweet" but I would have liked to seen more. In summary of the flaws, the game is a powderkeg of potential that is begging for detail and expansion.

The world the game is built on is amazing. It is a classical fantasy game with many of the elements we have come to expect: medieval timeline, fuedal structures, magic, demi-humans, monsters, magical revealed religions, knights, swords, nothing surprising there. The magic system is quick and fairly clean (though it is open ended and in need of care from the architect/GM). The combat system is fast and lends itself to easy combats that don't take half your game night. Weapons have interesting stats that make choosing between a sword and a hammer interesting without bogging down the system. Religion is revealed, leaving little open to interpretation. Overall fairly systematic fantasy roleplay.

Where this game truly excels is in the worldbuilding. In the world of Vaena has been flipped. While many of the elements of high fantasy are present, including it's many anachronisms, the game is set in a dark age between the reign of elves and dwarves, and the reign of humans. Travel is difficult, language is all important, knowledge is cloistered and hard to acquire, and the natural world is a significant challenge. But to make matters worse, magic is present in the world naturally in the form of fonts, places of planar connection between the divine realm and the natural world. If these fonts go untended, they can cause corruption of the natural world, unleashing monsters, demon and fae. Enter the Novarium, a hand-picked party of mages and hireling. Their task is to tame and tend these fonts and use the magic released to return the world to its natural state. Oh, and if you thought you would be playing in a world in which physical might and male-dominated societal structures were prevelent, you would be wrong. The gift of magic was given to women, who have turned that to their advantage. What history tells us about how women were treated in the Dark Ages of our own world are not mapped onto men, who have no access to magic. Of course there is valuable social commentary here, but that isn't the only way to look at the game. As a work of fantasy, it is yet another twist that pulls us out of what we think we know and how we view the world and allows us to fully immerse in a world with avery different point of view. It is no different than trying to imagine dragons or fireball spells. It's a novel approach and can be a great game for living vicariously and imagining a world very different from our own.

Of course, as I have noted so many times before, this amazing world-building is in desparate need of fleshing out, either by the publisher (time permitting) or by individual groups (though that can be a distraction from getting a game going).

Overall, I really enjoyed reading the game and building a character. The very quick playtest with my family seemed reasonable and easy to understand. The world is very interesting and fresh. It just needs more meat!

So. I just looked over a tabletop system that could have easily been written by feminists, for feminism. Novarium. A free game with decent enough gaming mechanics. The problem comes in its very pushy storyline background. I figured I would at LEAST give it a chance and perouse it..being a freebie. So lets dive into the story..brace yourself..there's no polishing this turd.

God is a female, and the Devil is an evil male that questioned her. He went off and did his own thing, but suddenly he was evil. Okay then. Throwing that part of it out the window but finding it odd..we continue. (Religion always was kind of odd, so I can only fault this one so much.)

Apparently, God has had enough of inequality, so he gives the power of magic or the Path of Light to women. And only women. That's right...we're going to promote equality by giving dangerous magical powers on par with nukes to only ONE group. HMM.

Immediately, the social situation changes and females embrace equality...by subjugating males entirely and making them completely subservient pieces of property only good for breeding or occasionally dying in battle..but forget higher forms of learning. (No joke, this is literally in the writing.)

Oh, and if you're a male with magic, then you're not a rarity. Oh no, according to the rules you must always be evil and in league with the Devil. And questioning or stepping outside of these guidelines and you are brought before their version of the inquisition and denied any form of afterlife and basically going to hell or doomed to walk as an undead. You could also be ostracized, tortured, or put into a form of "legalized slavery." What...the...hell, people.

Holy. Shit. Its like Anita Sarkeesian and the worst elements of Catholicism from ancient types had the most demented bastard child you could come up with and then they threw crystal meth into the equation. This is literally what is written in the text. Geeze, I mean...it has some really, really nice mechanics to it. But then you get to the story and the only way you could honestly enjoy something like this is if you're one of those feminists or one of those white knight male neutered feminists that has some severe mental issues of the "I deserve this because i'm a male" variety. Laugh it up, but those do exist and in numbers. Mechanics wise, I give it a 4/5. But anything else is in the negatives. Roleplaying games should be open and fun, not a political fuckfest because someone's latest facebook rally didn't get enough likes and they felt triggered by going into the real world. I would ALMOST go so far as to say that giving this away for free is a war crime, as the game itself promotes ideals that are quite frankly for the mentally unbalanced. I WOULD go so far as to say that its pushy enough to be acceptibility wise on par with a tabletop game made explicitly around the concept of rape. That is, entirely unacceptable. Avoid this game.

The other reviews do a great job of listing the awesomeness of this ruleset so I'll just list what I love about it personally.

1. Feels totally compatible with my old school D&D rules. I thin you could run this with almost no conversion, other than ascending AC.
2. I love the way the rules tie to the gaming philosophy. It's just the right combination of old school values (The game is more fun when real chances of failure exist with significant costs of failure) and new school, play it how you want.
3. The way classes give you skills and races give you saves is elegant and something I've thought about for years. Nice to see it in print.
4. The DM advice is clean and concise and WILL have you running a better game. It's mostly stuff we all know but it's presented in a way that will make it VERY easy to think about and make positive improvements to your game prep.
5. The entire game is in a small book. You need nothing else.
6. All your old monster books will work with it.

Now the bad. Or at least the stuff I didn't think would make my game work better.

1. There seems to be no basic fighter class. Was kind of put off by that. But, just use a fighter from some other old retro and you'll be fine.
2. Each class gets a way to add henchmen. Very cool. But you get an extra henchmen (or the ability to get one) EVERY SINGLE LEVEL! I can't imagine the game wouldn't get cumbersome by level 10 with 5 players all managing up to 10 henchmen. Seems that is what the game would be at that point. Maybe that would be awesome? Maybe it would be painfully tedious? Overall I love this ruleset!

A brilliant game, worth every penny if you want a simplified-yet-versatile fantasy rpg, but one oversight (sadly) keeps it from being the go-to game for my future fantasy gaming -- one of the core archetypes for this style of gameplay appears to be missing.

We have the Knight class; the warrior for whom social standing and public perception (honor) are crucial. We also have the Savage class, which effectively brings us the fierce, raging warrior from beyond the borders of decadent civilization.

What we lack is some sort of Sellsword or Mercenary class -- a character type some of my players have gravitated toward since the first edition of AD&D. The ex-soldier or city guard or similar, now seeking their fortune through adventure and plunder.

Neither a high-born fighter concerned with social standing, nor a wild barbarian primitive, the sellsword archetype is, perhaps, the "everyman" fighter.. Motivated to move beyond the familiar in search of fortune.

Don't get me wrong, Ambition & Avarice is probably the best and the smartest "original-school fantasy" ruleset I've seen in decades. If you have any interest, buy it. However, I know my players, and this lack of a seminal archetype has moved A&A from "a game I must run as soon as I possibly can" to " a game I will probably run, once I can figure out some sort of kluge version of the missing archetype".

My opinions, anyway.

It may indicate how good the game is, that I actually regret this turn of events.

1. Political dedications, seriously? Stephen Colbert, and John Stewart "speak truth to power" really they seem to speak agreement to power as long as it's somebody they like.
2. Rolling low is good now. Huh? Why did decide to reverse one of the basic tenets of 3rd edition?
3. A single new weapon system which is basically just the space version of a submarine wipes out interstellar civilization. Sure because remember how U-boats wiped out human civilization in Europe during the first World War.
4. Science Check needed. The revolutionary new fuel source requires the elements platinum and osmium for all the full tanks and fuel lines. That's pricey stuff, imagine if your car's gas tank, fuel lines and engine needed to be made out of gold or else they would explode, ya that'll make it affordable right.
5. Rules that make you go "huh?". Any damage to a person using a flamethrower has a chance to cause it to explode. So if I kick them in the shin...KABOOM!
6. Feats had to be renamed because...?
7. Sure the pictures are pretty but anybody can cut and paste stuff from the internet.

I've ran a couple of sessions of this game so far and have enjoyed them like I haven't enjoyed RPGs in a while.

The game accomplishes several things I've seen done only marginally well in other games, OSR and otherwise. The classes are all pretty grand and interesting, each filling a niche but serving a greater whole very well. They all also feel as wicked as they should, since the author wishes to convey adventurers as folk you don't want around and seems to succeed in all cases. As a whole, the book is just the right length, and the layout done so well, that it's a breeze to read through to process the content. Preparing a session is incredibly simple yet thorough and nearly the entire thing provides the GM with a wealth of tools to create worthwhile adventures easily. The shining gem of the game, though, is how painless it is to dispose of any rule that doesn't fit your playstyle. Unlike some games, the rules here feel very modular, which allowed me, for instance, to easily ignore weight and movement rates and feel no ill from it.

This is a shining gem of good OSR design and I'm glad to have bought this game within its 24 hours. Best investment in a game I've done to date. I don't think there is a single RPG I can recommend quite like I can recommend Ambition & Avarice.

The Last Candle is an OSR-compatible introductory module for low level characters. Much like the Keep on the Borderlands, this module provides an urban setting set around a priory (The Last Candle) and a nearby dungeon setting (The Eagle's Eyrie). This module is a step up from the classic Keep, however, because it offers numerous adventure opportunities in the surrounding lands.

There are five plot hooks set in the priory allowing for multiple different adventures. There are 20 wilderness encounters detailed for the surrounding areas. There are 11 areas of interest, further detailing these surrounding areas. Finally, the Eagle's Eyrie dungeon has 64 keyed rooms. The combinations of encounters, areas, and adventure opportunities should be more than enough for any group to adventure even past the 1-3 character levels listed on the front cover. Your group should get a lot of miles out of this product for only $4.

I've read and played through a plethora of retro-clones/variants and A&A is one of the most refreshing to read - it isn't a cut-n-paste job, the author has balanced easily-remembered streamlined rules with cool ideas in a well-laid-out PDF. His enthusiasm and experience shines through in the tone and the quality of advice given.

My gaming crew played our first A&A session a couple of days after purchase and I can confirm the rule-set plays as good as it reads, the innovations working together smoothly to enhance the old-school experience.

Well recommended !